Over the past two decades, various digital video compression technologies have been developed and standardized to enable efficient digital video communication, distribution and consumption. Most of the commercially widely deployed standards are developed by ISO/IEC and ITU-T, such as H.261, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 H.263, MPEG-4 (part-2), and H.264/AVC (MPEG-4 part 10 Advance Video Coding). Due to the emergence and maturity of new advanced video compression technologies, a new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), under joint development by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC MPEG. HEVC (ITU-T H.265/ISO/IEC 23008-2) was approved as an international standard in early 2013, and is able to achieve substantially higher coding efficiency than the current state-of-the-art H.264/AVC.
Compared to traditional digital video services (such as sending TV signals over satellite, cable and terrestrial transmission channels), more and more new video applications, such as IPTV, video chat, mobile video, and streaming video, are deployed in heterogeneous environments. Such heterogeneity exists on the clients as well as in the network. On the client side, the N-screen scenario, that is, consuming video content on devices with varying screen sizes and display capabilities, including smart phone, tablet, PC and TV, already does and is expected to continue to dominate the market. On the network side, video is being transmitted across the Internet, WiFi networks, mobile (3G and 4G) networks, and/or any combination of them.